Tag Archives: deflating atheism

A Deflating & Escaping Atheism hangout responds to Professor Stick, with a great video summarizing modern atheistic and scientism/materialist arguments.

The video begins with the usual intros and noting that Escaping Atheism is back after a 2 week hiatus. Max Kolbe discusses his serious technical issues, which required four trips to the repair shop.

Rob mentions that Mr. Spark, a regular commenter and fan, requested that Deflating Atheism and Max Kolbe take on a response video by Professor Stick. Professor Stick responded to a short video of Professor Alister McGrath, an atheist molecular bio-physicist who eventually became a Christian. Before watching clips of Professor Stick’s response video, Max Kolbe discusses Professor McGrath’s background in more detail. Rob and Max discuss the potential difficulties of the format and they begin the video.

Something that doesn’t get a lot of attention today are actual atheistic arguments, arguments for the position “God does not exist.” This is the result of an odd situation that occurred in the mid-20th century in which atheists essentially did two things:

(1) they admitted their position could not be defended and gave up trying to do so, and

(2) they still did not abandon their indefensible position, but instead shifted their position to a much more defensible one, agnosticism—except they did not do this honestly and openly, but redefined ‘agnosticism’ and ‘atheism’ so that they two words are now supposed to mean essentially the same thing (despite the fact that ‘agnosticism’ had been coined in explicit contradistinction to atheism, and also despite the fact that the loud atheist minority did not bother to ask permission of the agnostics before forcibly co-opting their identity).

What are the arguments that God does not exist? How strong are they? There are only four, to my knowledge, and if you suspect they are not very strong, given that atheists themselves recognized their complete failure, you would be correct.

Like this:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been active on social media. In that time, I’ve discovered that many atheists are active on social media as well and they often target me for my views on Christianity. I’ve learned much about many of their views, so this article offers some arguments to present my views in the context of theirs.

One discovery I’ve made is that many want “evidence” for my faith in Christianity. They don’t want to hear that many of the two billion Christians in the world have strong personal testimonies. This “anecdotal” evidence, even when considered collectively, is not enough. I told them that I could collect testimonies from a thousand people in my church to create an empirical study using subjective content analysis, which would analyze themes and patterns. They reply that they need physical evidence. Of course, they know that I can’t produce physical evidence of the metaphysical.